linux.conf.au:2003

Things have been going very well so far. Registration was a breeze (compared to last year). By having all the bags packed with the correct tshirt size and labeled with the person’s name, we could process each registration in less than a minute. We had some of the speakers giving out bags, which was nice.

The speakers dinner on Tuesday and was very successful. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, and I got to talk to many interesting people. Some of the other organisers managed to convinced Linus to make an appearance at the welcome session. You can see the results here.

Tutorials on Wednesday went quite well. Went to a bit of malcolm‘s talk in the morning, and to Rusty’s talk in the arvo. They were followed by the “Proffesional networking session” which also ran very well. Everyone who attended was very impressed with how things were going. Tony brought some very nice Little Creatures beers.

Thursday saw the start of the talks. Also, the fonts announcement happened at LWE, so I was finally able to talk about it . Jim has done a wonderful job following through with this. I hope to get a copy of the Vera fonts to display my slides with.

Has a nice lunch with malcolm, alan and telsa and managed to miss the first lot of talks afterwards.

After the talks, we had a Q&A session. On the panel we had Linus, Tridge and Bdale. Part way through, Rusty was added as well because he was answering so many questions. Afterwards, someone said something like “you know you are at a good conference when you have 3 people on the panel and none of them are Alan”.

After that, the Linux Australia AGM was run. As part of the conference registration, delegates automatically got a membership with LA. This has very quickly brought the total number of members up from 5 to about 405. There were nominations and elections for seats on its board. It wasn’t as well handled as I would have liked. Since the nominations happened right before the voting there were many candidates I didn’t really know, which made it hard to make an informed choice. Good to see some new faces on the board though. Will be interesting to see how things shape up.